The Future of IT Service Management

We are going through a light-speed technology revolution: from IT modernization to digital transformations, the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), not to mention “quantum computing”.

My advice? Hold on tight, continue to learn and grow your skills; have a growth mindset and try to learn these new emerging technologies.

As the great actor, Jimmy Dean, said: “I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

ITSM – 2018 and beyond

IT service management (ITSM) is changing: take the idea of service operation and putting in a service ticket; With emerging technologies and AI your computer will know about an issue before you do and will either submit a ticket or walk you through a fix. I’ve seen this happening already in reality.

Having AI handling these low level, low complexity demands will leave ITSM to focus on larger, more complex items – processes, governance and how everything fits together. This won’t happen overnight but organizations will need to attain this level, with ITSM well-placed help them understand the change. Technology will make life easier but will still require complicated connections behind the scenes.

Organizations will need multiple ITSM experts, either certified or learning how to do certain things to remain competitive and save/make money, whatever industry they’re in.

For practitioners, this means looking at all best practices and growing your skillsets and ITSM toolbox. Where previously the attitude was “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”, now it’s about how to disrupt and make something better. But when you’ve done that, you need service management to look at these things and continue making improvements. From a best practice perspective, ITIL brings all this together.

People, process and technology will set you apart from everyone else, leveraging all three comprehensively.

Learning to love analytics

Tracking trends through analytics and leveraging technology is going to be vital for anyone in ITSM.

This is a huge problem! Why? For example, you need to know what your top five incidents are or how long it takes to close a ticket? You need things in place – such as service level agreements and key performance indicators – to know what’s driving the service desk.

Without analytics there’s no accountability or real insight into how busy people are, how many staff you actually need and how efficient you are. With analytics behind your support metrics you will know why things are going wrong and can keep track of them.

Training, learning and CPD

It will be imperative for ITSM professionals to understand AI, the IoT and cloud computing. ITSM will need to continue leveraging complementary best practices (Lean Six Sigma, PMI, Agile, DevOps, etc) and technology for innovation. Staying up to date with the changes to ITIL in 2018 will help with this changing world.

Best practices are already starting to integrate, with people recognizing the need for all instead of one “silver bullet”. Depending on your scenario and where your organization is in the lifecycle, you need to pull from a bigger toolkit to get the best tool for the job.

Comments

Adam - agree with your statement about the importance of integrating best practices and avoiding temptation to find the "silver bullet" solution. I'm finding more and more there is a huge need for ITSM professionals to diversify their understanding both within the ITSM/ITIL space but also in other methodologies (Agile/Lean/etc). I'm anxious to see more updates within ITIL (or at least in its application) to account for the growing demand for speed/risk balance and DevOps.